The day the South cut up rough

The date of 2 December 1999 marked a turning point in the Seattle negotiations. It was the day delegates from countries of the South vented their anger at being fobbed off with a walk-on part in a farce. They had been wandering the corridors and lobbies of the conference centre for hours while negotiators from the rich countries hammered out the agenda behind their backs. Clearly, they were not to be allowed within the temple gates. Like the press and observers from the non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they were forced to rely on rumours and scraps of information from press conferences, half of which were cancelled at the last minute anyway.

Some of them were not even aware that the real negotiations were going on in the Green Room meetings that have come to symbolise everything that is undemocratic about the World Trade Organisation (WTO). According to European Commissioner Pascal Lamy, these meetings were attended by some 30 delegations and “were not closed to the developing countries; the Indian subcontinent was represented by countries like India, and the African continent by South Africa, Morocco or Egypt. Nevertheless, countries that did not have access to them disputed this system” (1). In reality, the four Quadrilateral powers (United States, Canada, European Union and Japan) convened the representatives of the South on an ad hoc basis, depending on the topics discussed.

The arbitrary nature of these cooptions was matched only by the informality of the closed sessions, where crucial decisions were taken under the chairmanship of Charlene Barshevsky, the US trade representative. The day after the conference ended in fiasco, Mike Moore, the WTO’s director-general, was still claiming that the negotiations had been conducted under a “committee of the whole” (2). In fact, Barshevsky had informed the plenary committee at the start of proceedings on 1 December that she reserved the right to hold Green Room meetings with a small number (...)